Chasing the Sun

Chasing the Sun. 2023. Video installation (color, no sound). 5760 x 1080 px. 5:00 looping. York College of PA.

Chasing the Sun is a series of prints, wallpaper, and animations that stretch across three screens. Each screen of the video installation is divided into eight vertical sections—24 vertical stripes for the 24 time zones. Within each stripe, remnants of extinct plants and eco-friendly homes designed by women architects drift while colors shift according to the time at each represented location. The results are slow-moving and meditative, providing a space for audiences across cultures and ages to process climate grief within the context of new understandings of geological time.

The series of prints remix the imagery from the animations, and one flowering plant, the Hibiscadelphus woodii, endemic to Kauai, Hawaii is made larger than life as wallpaper. Once thought to be extinct, Hibiscadelphus woodii, or Wood's hau kuahiwi, was rediscovered in 2019 by a drone where it was growing out of steep, vertical face of a cliff.

Inspired by artist Joelle Dietrick’s travels to Germany, Chile and China and her five-year-old daughter’s wish to travel at the same pace as the sun to never sleep, Dietrick began work on the series during the COVID pandemic when natural systems felt out of control.

Below is a Chasing the Sun suite of 24 prints on Hahnemuhle PhotoRag 308g, each 15.75 x 11.75 in, edition of 30. Each is numbered, titled, signed, and year in pencil, lower margin. Each print's title includes the name of the depicted extinct plant, its country, the time zone when it was last seen, and the date and time stamp of the remix made with a browser-based randomizer. Printed at Davidson College in North Carolina in 2023.

Chasing the Sun at the Shirley Project Space in Brooklyn from September 22–November 17, 2023
Chasing the Sun (24 UTC). 2023. Video (color, no sound). 3820 x 2160 px. 5:00.
Chasing the Sun (Process). 2023. Video (color, sound). 1920 x 1080 px. 2:48. Video by Diemo Productions for York College of PA.

Tags

extinct plants, architecture, time zones, extinction, climate change, architect, woman architect, female architect, gender, unity